"I've been applying industrial grade sunscreen to my skin most of my life. But nobody ever said that walking around would make the top of my head vulnerable, that I ought to have been wearing hats." (Shutterstock)

(Newser)
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It took nothing more than a bump on the head to grind Mary Elizabeth Williams' "best summer of my life" to a halt last week, she writes for Salon. "I hypochondriacally Googled 'infected cuts,' " she writes, never dreaming her search term should have been "cancer"—that bump turned out to be a malignant tumor, setting Williams off in a labyrinth of doctor's appointments and treatment, with new emotions at every turn. "Things move very quickly when you're in the Malignant Zone."

"Next week, I am going back to have a portion of my scalp removed," she writes. "I will wake up with a badass scar that I intend to go around telling people I got in Desert Storm." And while her diagnosis has driven her to down a beer or two or sob behind her sunglasses in the subway, at the end of the day, she concludes, "I am phenomenal at telling fear to suck it so I can go about the business of living. And so while I don't know what the future holds, with every breath in me, I'm going to keep doing what I do best. And live."

good for you for having such a positive and realistic attitude! many people with cancer spend more time trying to stay alive rather than actually living the rest of their lives - whether that be months or decades.

WilmaFlintstone

Aug 15, 2010 10:06 PM CDT

My husband has skin cancer now. It's taking a month to get from diagnosis to surgery. Not all that fast -- really. And....it isn't all that unusual anymore.